Advertising has evolved and changed since it’s arrival in the 1950’s. What might the future hold?
Photograph: ClassicStock/Alamy

I feel neither depraved nor uplifted by what I have seen ... certainly the advertising has been entirely innocuous. I have already forgotten the name of the toothpaste

That was the reaction of Bernard Levin of the Manchester Guardian the morning after the first television ad aired on 23 Sept 1955.

Sixty years on, having spent an evening watching ads, Levin is still bang-on. I’m underwhelmed, far from depraved and even further from uplifted.

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I’ll confess that despite my job in advertising, I’m just as prone to skipping through an ad break as anyone else is. The irony is that 16 years ago I left my job in TV and sold my soul to adland purely because of a Guinness spot I’d seen during the half-time break of a Champions League game.

There was time when ads were regularly better than programmes. During the early 1970s, in the absence of a meaningful British film industry, ambitious young filmmakers including Ridley and Tony Scott, Alan Parker and Adrian Lynne liberated ad breaks from the confines of stuffy household demos and served up cinematic panache.

Aided by the evolution of screen definition and surround sound, ad breaks became a showcase for bleeding-edge creative talent. The 60-second time restriction served only to distill the concepts into the purest essence of an idea. Our evenings were enriched, brands became famous and the UK film industry was reinvigorated by cooler, funnier minds.

Emerging advertising platforms tend to enjoy a period of renegade creativity – viral films and digital did the same. As soon as a medium becomes measurable, a dull symposium of research groups and management arrives and everyone loses their nerve; the artists flee. The best ads were made when businesses trusted brave creatives. Not every spot worked perfectly but the overall body of work was far more cherished by audiences.

Sixty years on from the first advert, TV advertising is for the most part an unwelcome interruption. As audiences pay to exclude ads on Spotify, adblock browsers and skip pre-rolls on YouTube, we have to accept that the age of enforced advertising is over.

Broadcasters have already progressed, selling ad-free entertainment via pay-per-view subscription models and box sets. The quality of global entertainment is getting good again. The talent pool, aided by seismic advances in cameras and editing technology, can now create and distribute work online and rely on a healthy festival circuit to help the cream rise.

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Brands and agencies are slowly exploring subjects and genres that better reflect a culture more turned on by human truths than by adland gloss. Embracing non-fiction and drawing on citizen journalism, they are now reaching their customers through targeted platforms, such as Vice TV. Red Bull continues to exemplify the modern way: creating, owning and exploiting its own events and athletes, and spending more on production and less on airtime.

The next 60 years will see smart brands directly funding TV shows without turning them into extended ads, as medium to large brands in the UK easily spend £10m-£50m on buying media, paying talent and producing campaigns. To put that into context, the BBC’s Peaky Blinders was shot on location, filled with Hollywood talent and cost around £1m an episode to make, which the Beeb will more than earn back through international sales. Audiences wouldn’t have balked if Guinness had paid to make that show. The new Bond film, Spectre, is reportedly one-third paid for by brands; in real terms that could be $100m (£65m) of marketing cash.

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If brands can leave product details and offers to their e-commerce and in-store teams, they can once again free up their agencies to create work with grander themes. As long as brands have budgets and customers have screens, the UK’s thriving community of filmmakers, musicians, animators and visual artists – inspired by 60 years of TV advertising – are set to leave us uplifted once more as the main event, not the enforced interval.